Colour botanical tattoo of pomegranates, leaves and blossoms covering a forearm, with a partly visible banner near the elbow.

Pomegranates and foliage on a forearm

Botanical · Forearm · Colour · Photo

A forearm sleeve of botanical tattoos shows two whole pomegranates, one cut open to reveal its seeds, with a branch of green leaves, a small flower and a hanging bud. The fruit is shaded in red and the foliage in green and grey, with fine linework defining the veins and edges. The arm is photographed against a blurred indoor background with a yellow flower arrangement.

Botanical Forearm Leaves Branch Flower Blossom Banner Bud Fruit

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A story inspired by this tattoo · fiction

The crate came aboard at Alexandria wrapped in straw that smelled of dust and sugar, and by the third day out of Malta the whole galley had taken on its colour. Cook Ambrose Teague sat on an upturned bucket with a paring knife and a tin basin, working the first fruit the way his mother had shown him in Deptford. He scored the skin in quarters, then prised it apart under the water so the seeds dropped clean and the bitter pith floated off like scum.

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Eli, the ship's boy, watched from the flour bin with his chin on his knees. "Why the water?" "So the juice stays in the seeds and not down your shirt." "Can I count them?" "Count what you like." The boy began in a whisper and had reached forty-one when the bell rang three times on the bridge, sharp and urgent, and Eli was up the ladder before the flour bin stopped rocking.

The steward came down an hour later with his cap in his hands. The fruit was for Mrs Harrow in Liverpool, who had written to the captain asking for pomegranates for her tea, having eaten them as a girl in Smyrna. She had died in the spring, and the captain had only just been told by wire at Gibraltar. Teague nodded and said nothing. He tipped the seeds into a clean jar and screwed the lid down, and they clicked against the glass like small red beads on a string.

When Eli came back he had lost his place in the count and his eyes were red from the wind. Teague shook a spoonful of seeds into his palm. "Eat one. The sour ones are the best." The boy did, screwed up his face, and then laughed out loud. Teague pressed the rest into the cracked sill of the porthole, where the spray would reach them and the sun would dry them into little garnets, and left them there for the voyage home.